Reading Smart

Sometimes I get the urge to read something by someone who's smarter than me. Fortunately, there are thousands of people who fit that description, but most of them aren't interested in things that I particularly care about. For example, you can see every day in the week, and twice on Sunday, articles about the mating habits of the Egyptian pygmy moth, the effect on monetary policy of Keyne's digestion, algorithmic permutations as a factor in the causation of triple tuples, and all that sort of incredibly literate and altogether incomprehensible-to-me stuff. Its everywhere, and whenever I get a bit of eye-glaze from having seen and quickly flipped past an article like that, I usually get just a twinge in the part of my psyche that tells me that I ought to care about that sort of thing. Exactly why I should care, the probing voice doesn't tell me, other than the darkly muttered comment that 'well, if you're so smart, why aren't you up on these things?' In bad moments I can get this abuse from the weirdest places: I was reading a Nero Wolfe novel the other day, and the hero is reading one of the many dense books he enjoys; I found myself wondering why it was that I never found myself captivated by the same kind of thing.

So I do try. And every so often I find a book that fits those descriptions -- I believe I mentioned Blind Oracles a few entries ago; that qualifies -- and then I try to get around to reading it. Because it seems to me that I tend to read -- actually slow down and read carefully -- very few types of things. Recipes for desserts, for example. Popular articles about economics (Ben Stein, whom I slimed here a while ago, does pretty good ones.) Some science fiction (though I will reread and reread old Star Trek novels before venturing onto new turf; I like hard science fiction, and most stuff doesn't have that.) Biographies on occasion, or books about science, particularly physics; I don't understand most of it, but I like reading it anyway. And articles on medicine and physiology are always fascinating to me. Not too much on the practice of information processing (CIO magazine is about as close as I get, and occasional articles in the paper), though what I'd really like is to understand (at a high level) some of the theory of the handling of information -- for example, are there theories about how to best present information? Other than Tufte's work, that is. Is the visual presentation of information at odds with making it searchable and retrievable? James Fallows occasionally writes on this kind of thing; I'd be happy if I could just formulate the questions that I'd like to know more about, instead of 'just wondering'.

But the only way I know to get close to any of this is to just look for hard books and try to read them. So I do that. Not often, not well, but I do it.

Wish there was a Book of the Month club for stuff like that.